Yet responsible progressives and populists seeking a more restrained foreign policy would do well to study the sources of his success: how he was able to advance his expansive foreign-policy vision through the great vicissitudes of the past three decades, even as his own party’s base turned against foreign interventionism. A more restrained foreign policy won’t succeed unless the restrainers master Graham’s arts.

Graham — a son of the working class, who raised his teenaged sister after their parents died young — had an overabundance of what the ancient Greeks called phronesis: the practical wisdom essential to effective political activity. Politics is an art of prudence, of making practical judgments, adding allies, and compromising wherever possible — while putting up a fight when absolutely necessary. Principle and ideas matter, but the practicing politician can’t, and shouldn’t, hold himself to the same standards as the philosopher or even the journalist.

Graham understood this. Maybe he understood it a little too well, but in the final analysis, he got closer to the truth of politics than did most of his enemies.

Nowhere was this more apparent than his response to the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Like many others in the Republican establishment, Graham initially balked at the former New York developer and reality-TV barker’s bid to take over the party of Lincoln. “If we nominate Trump,” he warned on social media during the 2016 GOP primary, “we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”

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Once Trump became inevitable, Graham made his peace. And thereafter, he remained doggedly loyal, championing most of the president’s domestic issues and rising to his personal defense in the face of the underhanded lawfare that bedeviled Trump for the better part of a decade. Graham came around forcefully in recognizing the Russiagate hoax for what it was and resisted the first impeachment attempt over Trump’s “perfect” Ukraine phone call (remember that?). The South Carolinian also understood Trump’s almost-compulsive need to vent — to have somebody around to shoot the shit with. And he made himself constantly available, over the phone and on the golf course.

Graham’s loyalty and personal warmth paid dividends and gathered compound interest, which he would then cash out when it came time to promote his pet causes. He could disagree with Trump — over his Syria withdrawal, the Afghan drawdown, and the Ukraine war — without blowing up the relationship. And during the second term, his proximity allowed him to push for the hawks’ holy grail: a full-on war with Iran.

To note all this isn’t to endorse the substance of any of these policies. But Graham’s record tends to vindicate those inside the Trump administration — many of them opposed to the late senator’s agenda — who wish restrainers in Congress could be a bit more strategic. The likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie dynamited their Trump ties over antiwar principle; Graham went to the afterlife having gotten his Iran war.

Beyond his masterful management of Trump, Graham was also a consummate legislator of the old-school, Tip O’Neill variety: clubby, compromising, and surprisingly willing to break with the Right when a measure served the national interest (by his lights). For example, he backed the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act, aimed at bolstering the domestic semiconductor industry, as well as the 2022 bipartisan gun-safety bill. Such across-the-aisle efforts didn’t endear him to the small-government faithful, and he earned his 59% lifetime score from the keepers of Republican orthodoxy at Heritage Action. But bipartisanship built up political capital on the Hill that he could expend elsewhere.

Like the best of modern lawmakers, moreover, Graham was a master at directing oodles of federal development cash to his home state. Visit his X account, and you’ll see most of his feed devoted to showcasing the bacon he brought home as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee: a Coast Guard base in Charleston, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility (also in Charleston), a federal grant to replace 18 bridges across the Palmetto State, and on and on. It’s true that Graham was a beneficiary of Israel Lobby and defense-industry largess. But he likely wouldn’t get re-elected if it weren’t for his relentless developmentalism (or pork-barrel politics, if you must).

Even as he relished congressional wheeling-and-dealing, Graham could be ferocious in a fight. For my money, his single best moment as a lawmaker came during the 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As the holes in rape accuser Christine Blasey Ford’s account were widening in public view, Graham publicly excoriated the Democrats who’d used her in a quest to destroy Kavanaugh.

“What you wanna do is destroy this guy’s life, hold his seat open, and hope you win in 2020,” Graham said, his body and voice shaking. “You’ve said that, not me.… I would never do to [Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor] what you’ve done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.” The oration is well worth watching in full. To me, it was the decisive pivot that made Kavanaugh’s eventual confirmation possible.

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Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Graham stood for a comprehensive account of why American power is good, and what its exercise on the world stage is meant for. His worldview was, as one writer for Responsible Statecraft has noted, essentially that of an old Cold Warrior: unbending support of proxies and allies against larger nation-state adversaries, the passionate if hypocritical and uneven promotion of democracy abroad.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that worldview lost its coherence and salience. The sheer hyperactivity to which it gave rise over the past quarter-century drove Washington into more than one quagmire, dissipating American power and corroding its domestic foundations. Graham-ism has now reached its apotheosis in Trump’s Persian Gulf War III, which has forced the president to choose between prolonged economic pain or an embarrassing quick exit.

Yet the lesson for the restraint camp — my camp, as it should be clear — is that we need some larger moral vision or story, a plausible substitute for Graham-ism. “Get out of everywhere all at once” is no more credible or responsible than his “Fight everyone, everywhere, all at once.” I’m not sure we have such a substitute on hand. Likewise, if Graham overestimated the reserves of American power, I sometimes worry that the restraint camp underestimates them. The passing from the stage of the likes of Graham and Sen. Mitch McConnell provides an opening for developing such ideas and translating them into political action.

Graham’s Senate career offers a template for the sort of practical wisdom the task requires. He was as wise as a serpent, if too far from the innocence of a dove.

This scene is from The Long Kiss Goodnight, a Nineties action movie about a mercenary-turned-suburban mum whose past comes back to haunt her. It’s not a particularly central moment, but it does act as an excellent meta-study in the way that Hollywood tropes serve as shorthand, reducing complex characters to simple, and sometimes self-delusional, stereotypes. By having the man offer a doll to the child, the scriptwriters spin a narrative about how we should see him: there are villains and there are villains, and this one, despite having masterminded a plan to explode thousands of people to death, has a soft side. Maybe he’s not so bad?

It’s been two weeks since Hamas began to release some of the Israeli hostages kidnapped on October 7 — women and children mostly, many of whom had been held in the tunnels beneath Gaza for 50 straight days. Since then, I’ve noticed a version of the scene above playing out again and again, especially in the US, and especially online, as people hunt for familiar tropes that might shape their understanding of the story, and of the people in it. These commentators, always Western and often very young, have learned to watch the news in search of a story instead of the truth — and they’re certain that they recognise the typical characters.

The young woman photographed gazing at her captors with seemingly dizzy adoration, for instance, looks an awful lot like the kidnapped princess who falls in love with her roguish captor before joining his revolution. The 9-year-old who returned to Israel with a fixation — not uncommon among victims of group starvation scenarios — on making sure that the people around her are getting enough to eat is the archetypal foundling, raised by so-called savages who taught her hospitality, manners and consideration of others. There’s even a classic save-the-cat moment, that plot device in which a character’s kindness to an animal establishes him as a good guy worth rooting for. If a shih-tzu survived nearly two months under the care of Hamas, how bad could they really be? Perhaps a heart of gold lurks under that villainous exterior. Or: perhaps these so-called terrorists aren’t the villains at all.

“As the Israel regime — with full Western support — is committing genocide in Gaza and massacring women and children, the Israeli female prisoners held by the Resistance are treated with kindness and respect,” reads one representative post on X. On TikTok, commentators are claiming outright that the Israeli hostages clearly love their kidnappers and would have preferred to stay in Gaza: “These people are friends. Don’t even tell me that was acting.”

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In the past two months, much has been written about the oppressor/oppressed framework that the progressive Left applies to the question of Israel and Gaza. Seeing Israeli citizens as white-privileged settler-colonisers is a way of justifying a bizarrely sympathetic, even celebratory reaction to the militants who killed hundreds of civilians. But while the phenomenon I’m observing slightly overlaps, it’s ultimately something different: a particularly American tendency to treat whatever is happening in the world like a months-long entertainment event, equal parts melodrama and spectator sport. Having identified the players on the stage — the heroic underdog, the corrupt superpower, the villain with a soft side — progressives are watching the war in Gaza like it’s a Marvel superhero film.

There are shades, here, of the early days of the war in Ukraine, when arts institutions were hurriedly scrubbing Tchaikovsky and Dostoyevsky from their programmes, bars purged vodka-based drinks from their menus, and it was difficult to tell where pro-Ukraine sentiment ended and anti-Russian animus began. That binary thinking is a hallmark of fan culture, increasingly the dominant if not only mode of engagement, no matter how serious a subject. Once a person has decided that Hamas are the good-guy underdogs who can do no wrong, any allegations of wrong-doing will naturally be received with incredulity. “Zionists are asking that we believe the uncorroborated eyewitness account of *men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms,” writes commentator Briahna Joy Gray. “Shame on Israel for not seriously investigating claims of rape and collecting rape kits.”

It’s interesting to juxtapose this sceptical response to stories of widespread sexual violence by Hamas on October 7 with an event much closer to home: that moment, just five years ago, when Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh was accused of attempted rape by Christine Blasey Ford. What’s striking now is not just the sudden irrelevance of every hard-won #MeToo-era more — a woman’s word was to be believed, until, suddenly, it isn’t — but the way it manifested online. Images of Ford testifying about her experience were instantly remixed into a meme, while the internet set about dreamcasting what seemed like an inevitable biopic.

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Here, too, everyone understood exactly what kind of story was being told — who the hero was, and conversely, who was the villain. The fact that it was playing out in real life, in real time, did not inject gravitas to the situation; if anything, it only more thoroughly crystallised into pure team sports tribalism. Hence, we all agreed that fan-favourite Laura Dern would play Ford; hence, also, nobody saw anything strange about the absolute farce of a congressional hearing in which someone blew up a page from Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook to poster size and analysed its contents like it was a message from the Zodiac killer. Remember the cynicism when Kavanaugh had to explain that “boofing” was a fart joke? He’s lying!, people screamed, in exactly the same spittle-flecked tone that my husband sometimes screams, That’s a foul!, when someone knocks down a player on Duke’s college basketball team.

It doesn’t actually matter if it was a foul. The existence of objective truth is irrelevant in this moment: facts don’t matter, feelings do. Faith does.

This is why Brett Kavanaugh was a liar, whether he was lying or not. It’s why Taylor Swift fans scrutinise footage of her and Travis Kelce like it’s the footage of JFK’s assassination, then confidently declare that they’re really in love (or not). And it’s why a self-described anti-Zionist content creator will look at a picture of a young woman surrounded by the terrorists who shot and kidnapped her — and then post it on the internet with the caption: “Find yourself a woman who looks at you like this.”

Of course, the same type of person who tweets the above will also dismiss stories of sexual violence on October 7 as “IDF propaganda”. Forget the testimonies of the forensic scientists who examined the victims’ bodies, of the soldiers who discovered them, even of the rapists themselves; forget the videos of kidnapped women being forced into cars, their trousers soaked with blood at the crotch; forget the corpses lying naked from the waist down with their legs still unmistakably spread open despite a censor’s blur. None of this will ever be enough to shake the devoted fan’s faith in his home team’s righteousness. The best you’ll get is a shrugging equivocation: if these rapes occurred, they were nothing in comparison to Palestinian suffering.

Maybe this facile, emotionally-driven logic is an inevitable feature of the digital age, where fact and fiction alike are flattened into the same familiar mould, distributed across the same platforms, consumed on the same screens. In this world, it’s increasingly hard to know the difference between news and narrative, an advertiser and an influencer, the prescriptive and the descriptive; even the lines between these things begin to blur as they all tumble around in the same giant bucket labelled with just one word: “content”.

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And in this world, of course people cease to discern, and instead search for an anchor: an archetype that offers a shortcut to understanding. No wonder every conversation about Israel these days turns into a shouting match about who is the bigger villain. Why have a debate when you can impose a narrative?

Make these observations aloud, and someone will inevitably show up to claim that it’s all the fault of progressive ideology, or critical theory, or postmodernism. But I suspect this gives the narrative-clingers — not to mention the rape denialists — too much credit. Postmodernism is much more sophisticated and ideological than what actually fuels this phenomenon, which is nothing more or less than the urge to reduce a complex geopolitical conflict down to something easily understood, with familiar characters and a classic plot arc and about as much moral ambiguity as an episode of Scooby Doo.

It’s about knowing not just what is happening, but what will happen: the good guys will solve the crime, the villain will be unmasked and taken away in a paddy wagon, and a happy ending will follow shortly thereafter. And that blazing certainty feels good, no doubt, when the truth is so unsatisfying: not just that wars rarely end happily, but that this one will surely still be raging long after the radical chic have moved on.

Youngkin took up residence in the Virginia statehouse in 2021, unexpectedly defeating (51% to 49%) the incumbent, Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, in a state that is increasingly Left-leaning. The election was decided by independents, who split for Youngkin 54% to 45%. There is a lesson here: the back-and-forth tendencies of the unaffiliated — usually driven by the desire to punish incumbents for failures in the run-up to the election — decide most American elections, which often come down to little more than a coin flip. Youngkin’s election therefore offers a blueprint for a Republican Party free from Donald Trump and trying to win over a nation that’s only getting more liberal.

Youngkin focused his campaign on education. He leaned heavily on the issue of removing “critical race theory” from classrooms and giving parents and local elected officials more control over public school curricula. Meanwhile, private-school graduate (and parent) McAuliffe handed him some excellent fodder for attack ads. The Democrat, who wanted to veto legislation that would have required schools to inform parents about sexual content in educational materials, told his opponent: “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and take books out and make their own decision… I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This blunder did not go down well with voters.

Since his victory, the liberal media has cloaked Youngkin’s success with a narrative: his privilege appealed to Virginia’s conservative elite. But this is a fiction. Youngkin may be rich (the former private equity executive is worth hundreds of millions), but he actually didn’t over-perform in the state’s wealthy northern counties — Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate who opposed Terry McAuliffe in 2013, fared considerably better in suburban Fairfax, Prince William, and Loudoun, three of Virginia’s five wealthiest counties. Youngkin’s campaign did, however, dramatically increase turnout in the southern and western corners of the state. For instance, he won 80% of the vote in southwestern Dickenson County, the poorest county in Virginia. Winning these areas by massive margins, partly by significantly increasing turnout relative to the 2018 midterm elections enabled Youngkin to more than offset his losses in the suburbs.

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This is the Republican Party’s most viable plan for long-term success: swaying independents, or at least not driving them away, while also increasing turnout in poor rural areas. (The prosperous suburbs are likely lost forever, at least in terms of winning majorities and congressional seats.) Key to achieving it in 2021 was the delicate balance that Youngkin maintained vis-a-vis Trump’s legacy. Initially, he benefited from an event staged by Steve Bannon, at which Trump himself appeared via video. Youngkin thanked them for their endorsements, but later criticised the fact that attendees had pledged allegiance to a flag that had flown at the January 6 rally. Youngkin also found ways to dodge issues related to the propriety of the 2020 elections and whether he would certify its results.

Youngkin walked a fine line when it came to the classically Trumpist issues as well. After securing the nomination, he quickly pivoted from stressing his opposition to abortion (he supports banning the procedure after 15 weeks) and expanded handgun purchase limitations, as he had done during the primary. Instead, he emphasised education, even declining to fill out the candidate survey necessary to secure the formal endorsement of the National Rifle Association.

Crucially, though, he refrained from making these strategic moves in an obvious way. His team did not scrub abortion-related language from his website after he won the primary, as losing Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters’s did. He issued no ringing denunciations of Trump in the style of Wyoming Congressperson Liz Cheney or Utah Senator Mitt Romney. He merely segued from one set of advertisements that were intended to win over the base, to another set of advertisements that would appeal to independents (though he did, once safely atop the party’s ticket, acknowledge Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election).

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Youngkin understands something that is overlooked by both good-government, establishment Republicans, such as Mitt Romney, and potential head-to-head Trump competitors, such as Ron DeSantis: you cannot drive up turnout from the base if you veer too far from their red-meat social issues and support for Trump, but you cannot win the general election if you fail to appeal to independents. Youngkin, according to University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato, is sitting around 0% in the 2024 presidential polling; but he is playing a much longer game than either Trump or DeSantis — he is, as one might expect of someone with a background in finance, engaged in succession planning. 

There is precedent for this, particularly within the Republican Party, and particularly after the departure of a conservative whose rhetorical style set the tone for an entire decade. When then-Vice President George H.W. Bush was preparing to run for president in 1988, he had to fill the shoes of Ronald Reagan, a man who defined the priorities of an increasingly conservative, family values-oriented GOP.

Bush’s similarities to Youngkin are striking but unsurprising — tall, soft-spoken former college athletes with elite pedigrees tend to have political instincts that incline them to moderation. And the course Bush took to victory in his first presidential election mirrored Youngkin’s approach to winning Virginia last year. During the primary, Bush tacked to the Right, noting that he had repudiated his Seventies-era support for Keynesian economics and now backed the idea of a Human Life Amendment that would have effectively overturned Roe v. Wade. Lacking Reagan’s endorsement, Bush finished third in the Iowa caucus, behind centre-Right Senator Bob Dole and far-Right televangelist Pat Robertson. It forced him to curry favour with moderate New Hampshire governor John Sununu, whom he would reward with an appointment as chief of staff following his victory in the general election, while running even harder to the Right to peel the base away from Robertson, who had shocked the political establishment with his strong Iowa performance. Thus was an initial polling deficit in the New Hampshire primary turned into a resounding victory for Bush, the momentum from which carried him to the nomination. 

During the general election, Bush faced Michael Dukakis — Massachusetts’s longest-serving governor and the ostensible architect of the “Massachusetts Miracle”, one of the fastest service-driven economic turnarounds in the history of the rapidly deindustrialising United States. Bush quite astutely ran towards the centre during the general election, hammering home a pledge to oppose tax increases — popular with independent voters, as this was the part of the Reagan legacy that resonated most strongly with them. He paired this with extremely effective attack ads tied to Willie Horton, a convicted felon from Massachusetts who raped a woman while on furlough during Dukakis’s administration, to paint the centre-Left Dukakis as dangerously soft on crime.

He also seized on Dukakis’s opposition, while governor of Massachusetts, to a law that would have required all students to recite the US Pledge of Allegiance — another issue that polled well at the time with independents and painted Dukakis as an extremist and Bush as the patriotic centrist. In one of his most famous campaign speeches, Bush called for a “kinder, gentler nation” in dealing with discrimination, illiteracy and even the environment (a speech derided by Trump in 1990, a mere two years after Bush gave it). The result was a resounding victory in the electoral college, where Bush won the popular vote in 40 of 50 states.

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Bush offers Youngkin, and any aspiring Republican leader, a useful model. He took the popular language of activists and ideologues and finessed it, in order to move the party back towards the centre sufficiently to win over independent voters. The base will always be there, as long as they’re not infuriated by your criticism of their supposed backwardness. But you can increase their turnout if you focus your attack ads on subjects that relate to the nature of governance, but demand minimal expense or executive follow-through to deliver on once elected. Attempting to rewrite the public school history curriculum, which members of both parties have been doing since the early 20th century, is relatively cheap, for instance, compared to issuing pronatalist family subsidies such as those those championed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. But thunderously condemning that curriculum can pay dividends at the ballot box.

Youngkin is going to have to maintain this balance until he can run neither alongside nor against Trump. At the moment, he is having less success than many had hoped during this year’s midterms. In perhaps his worst gaffe of the campaign cycle, he told the audience at a congressional campaign rally for former Latino police officer Yesli Vega that her election could help “send Nancy Pelosi back” to be with her husband Paul, who had been attacked inside their house in California. This kind of tough talk might elicit laughter were it coming from Donald Trump, but from Youngkin — whose relaxed Southern prep-school bonhomie can lapse into something akin to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s sad exhortation to “please clap” — it came across as odd and off-putting.

In a closely-watched congressional election, incumbent Virginia Congressperson and centre-Left “Blue Dog Democrat” Abigail Spanberger withstood a fierce challenge from Yesli Vega. This defeat was cited as a failure of the Youngkin model, but not only was Spanberger — a former CIA officer — arguably the most moderate Democrat in the running, she actually underperformed relative to Terry McAuliffe in her own district, suggesting the tide is still swinging in Youngkin’s direction. 

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If Youngkin is experiencing growing pains, no matter: he is a youthful 55-year-old amid the gerontocracies controlling both parties. Like Bush in 1988, he has a long road ahead of him, but issues he has championed, such as school choice, have major support behind them. On the subject of Covid vaccines, lockdowns and employment mandates — towering issues over the past three years — his middle-of-the-road positions, coupled with recent data suggesting that school lockdowns had a negative impact on educational attainment, suggest he’s comfortably on the winning side of the current national consensus. And so far he’s resisted spitting the excessive venom that could cost him votes from independents. 

If Youngkin is to challenge the likes of DeSantis for the party’s throne, his admittedly thankless job will be to carefully guide the Republican Party back to the centre. As he does so, he needs to pick his culture wars wisely, focusing on issues that offer the greatest return on investment from a marketing cost and the least post-election investment in their fulfilment.

This might seem cynical, but politics is a game played by cynics, or at least by practical operatives — and if Republican leaders generally fail to think like this, the party is in danger of splitting in two. Imagine a nationalist wing for Trump and DeSantis and another, smaller, pro-business wing for Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. That sort of shock therapy might be what many diehards sorely want, but it isn’t what they — or the party — actually need, at least if they’re planning to win elections over the next decade or so. It is certainly not in the best interest of the independent voters splitting their tickets and budgeting their inflation-ravaged paychecks, for whom a flourishing, bipartisan civil society is preferable to civil war. 

When we got to the venue, something strange was going on. There was a palpable hostility, something I had never encountered before in these places. People saw our camera and scowled. They heard my best impersonation of the sainted actor and seemed distressingly less bowled-over than normal.

As we interviewed people outside the hall where McCain was due to appear, I thought of my mum. She would have rolled her eyes at these folk — she was a Quaker peace activist and had firm views about America generally and the Republican party in particular. But, equally, she would have wanted me to do them justice, despite the difficulties presented.

She thought the media played a role in demonising perfectly reasonable protests (like the CND marches she attended) by focusing on the maddest looking demonstrators. So what should I do about the woman who told me, as we stood in the sun outside the hall, that Barack Obama was, to use her precise words, “An abortionist, a child killer, a murderer”?

Channelling mum, I decided not to use the clip. The woman seemed upset, deranged even. John McCain’s campaign had been a paragon of moderation – he had recently ticked off a supporter at a meeting who described Obama as an Ay-rab – and the use of this woman, and a couple of others who also seemed beyond the pale, would do the whole party and the whole campaign a disservice. Perhaps it was just an off day for her, for all the people gathered. It would not be fair to use them to characterise the wider party base.

Or would it? Looking back, knowing what we now know, we should have used that clip and the others. We should have used our vox-pops to do what vox-pops rarely do: tell us what was happening. I should have spotted — we all should have spotted — that the Republican party was heading irrevocably in a direction not charted by Senator McCain. We should have seen that he was toast, not at the hands of the Democrats, most of whom rather liked and admired him, but at the hands of his own people, his own party. I should have made more of the fact that almost all the people I met that day were energised by the thought of a Sarah Palin presidency. And by an irrational hatred of Obama: not Obama dislike but Obama phobia.

Two new books on the fate of the Republican party make the point that, far from being a hostile takeover, the Trump rise to power was driven by this grassroots — as well as plenty of people at the top. They suggest it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court by the New York Times’s Jackie Calmes focuses on Brett Kavanaugh, the Trump appointed Supreme Court Justice who tipped the balance of the court towards the conservatives: the moment the desires of the Republican base became realised. The moment, in a sense, that they won. But it makes a wider point about the people and the party whose victory this was:

“Its voters were Trumpian before they’d embraced his brand ….Long before he’d descended the Trump Tower escalator to run for president, the base was dominated by culture warriors who’d been riled for decades by Rush Limbaugh, his thousands of local imitators, Fox News pundits, and ever more right-wing websites and networks; by 2020 most Republicans got their ‘news’ solely from such sources, willfully closed off from balanced, factual coverage and unpersuadable. Disillusioned by George W. Bush, they’d coalesced as the leaderless Tea Party. Finally, they jumped on the Trump Train.”

Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, in his collection of essays, The Cruelty is the Point:The past, present and future of Trump’s America, suggests that a remarkable myopia at the top of the Republican party allowed this to happen. They thought they were all heading for the same promised land – the bow-tied intellectuals in Washington think tanks and the sweaty farmhands. But no:

“Conservative intellectuals misunderstood that Eden and what it looked like. They projected their low-tax, federalist, small-government beliefs onto a Republican rank and file whose views were far more complex and far more motivated by identity than conservative commentators wanted to admit. So when an authoritarian reality-show star …. appeared, promising to ‘Make America Great Again’, they believed the conservative base would reject him.”

Ooops.

Well ok, but why would they have this belief in the first place? Surely the fault is not with the “great unwashed”, as it were, but in their leaders who failed either to understand them or to bother to work out how to help them come to terms with modernity? The party panjandrums had not exactly delivered for their people. In the era of globalisation, the drift of jobs to China, the atomisation of communities, the relentless onward march of the values of the elite, they had not done much to halt it or suggest alternatives. George W Bush seriously tried, in his second term, to privatise the US federal pension system: the ultimate free-market liberal solution to a problem (future unsustainable debt) that most of the party base could not understand or give a monkey’s about.

So, no, I didn’t see it coming in Ohio on the day my Hugh Grant charm bombed, but nor did people a good deal closer to the party. And it was their job to lead. In that respect, hindsight is doing a lot of work in Dissent : the Trump cataclysm was not quite as obvious as Jackie Calmes suggests. Also, with their focus on Republican party, these books suggest that the Democrats were somehow blameless bystanders, watching as half the nation took to pills and cheap booze and the fetishising of better times when cars had fins and girls wore prettier frocks.

No: all of upper-middle-class America was complicit. Dissent suggests that Kavanaugh, this unappetising privileged man, party animal who was accused (though never in court) of attempting rape, was somehow emblematic of a Republican party that had lost its bearings. But all of what the author Chris Arnade has called “front row America” had lost its bearings. The Democrats were as (perhaps, are as) committed to elite protection as the GOP was. The capture of places at the best universities. The amassing of great wealth down the generations. The huge pay in Google or Facebook or whatever anti-racist, anti-sexist corner office they inhabit. To blame it on Kavanaugh and the capture of the Supreme Court seems a bit lame: it is arguably true that the court has been skewed by a rural/conservative bias imposed with little democratic accountability. It is certainly true that rural states representing minorities of Americans have assisted in bringing this modern Supreme Court into existence. But shouldn’t the Democrats have seen this coming? Could they not have kept their appeal wide enough to head off disaster?

One of the oddnesses of modern US politics is how the structural imbalance of power has been accentuated. The divide between rural and urban America is not new: but the almost total retreat of the Democrats from the rural areas and of the Republicans from inner cities has placed a formerly gentle conflict on steroids. In the past, it was not principally party-political. Small state conservative Democrats were a thing, so were big city progressive Republicans. That’s almost over now: and the big cities put the Democrats in charge of the culture, leaving the small towns to place the Republicans in charge of the politics of the nation, via the various processes that keep urban political power in check.

You can see why the cultural losers in the boondocks fight so hard to win politically. What Jackie Calmes calls “the radicalization of the Republican party” is not just about being nasty. It’s about holding on to an idea of a nation that until recently was widely accepted. Or is that naïve? Is it also about a dislike, a fear, of people of colour?

Adam Serwer’s book claims that the Republican radicalisation is mostly about race. The title is from an essay he wrote, a piece that caught the mood of the anti-Trump nation during the presidency. Serwer had been looking at photos of lynchings of black men in the deep south — at the suffering and the pleasure it was giving the attackers:

“Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.”

That single paragraph electrified anti-Trump America. Finally, an explanation for all the horror. An explanation that does not excuse or condone or dress up with some fake stuff about reduced life chances but an explanation that does also explain Trump supporters in a way that does not dehumanise them. In the book of essays Serwer provides context and builds on the theme. But he’s a subtle writer: this is not a dull jeremiad about racial injustice tearing America apart. In fact rather the opposite. As he says in one of the essays, he sees a way out:

“The reality… is that political violence is less common in the present than it has been at many points in American history, despite the ancient plague of white supremacy, the lingering scourge of jihadism, and the influence of a president who revels in winking justifications of violence against his political opponents and immigrants. Many Americans can’t stand one another right now. But apart from a few deranged fanatics, they do not want to slaughter one another.”

Well, it’s a start. Sawyer concentrates on what the Democrats must do now. Press on, he says. Don’t compromise. In fact, his call is for a radicalisation of the Democrats to match the Republicans. After this political fight, make sure there is a winner and a loser. Don’t compromise to turn it into a tie that undoes the victory, as happened more than a century ago: “In the aftermath of a terrible war, Americans once purchased an illusion of reconciliation, peace, and civility through a restoration of white rule. They should never again make such a bargain.”

I am not entirely sure that the nation can take the kind of punishment Adam Serwer has in mind – presumably involving the packing of the Supreme Court, the abolition of the remaining rights of Senators to filibuster, perhaps the abandonment of the electoral college too. And the mighty roar of a Trump-inspired fight-back.

Both these books assume that the Democrats must go for broke now. Sawyer wants constitutional and political upheaval and Calmes seems to think the whole game is up: she has also lost faith in the ability of the Republican party to come home to democracy. She approvingly quotes the conservative anti-Trump columnist Kathleen Parker: “The chance to move away from Trumpism, towards a more respectful civilized approach to governance that acknowledges the realities of a diverse nation and that doesn’t surrender to the clenched fist, has slipped away. What comes next is anybody’s guess.”

My guess is that it’ll be bumpy but ultimately the Republicans will return to democracy. And the Democrats, under Biden, will keep to a moderate path. Optimism about America is in short supply, I grant you; but in the Serwer essays, we have a clear-minded Left-wing critic of his nation who is essentially coming out as an optimist. There is no point, he believes, in concentrating on Trump. There is every point in noticing what has happened, and learning from it:

“As much as he may have appeared to be the driver of the forces tearing the country apart, he was more a consequence of them, of our failure as a nation to live up to our founding promises. The cruelty was the point, but it was also always a part of us.”

Don’t give up, in other words. Not on the Republicans. Not on America. Not on democracy.

The field is being hit with wave after wave of contraction, and local and regional newspapers are dying to the point where all that’s left, with the exception of a handful of the biggest cities, is a giant news desert dotted with tiny puddles. Countless layoffs have ravaged the industry, leading to many heartbreaking cases of journalists being marooned, midlife, in an unforgiving labour landscape. 

My theory is that “Learn to code,” a meme often hurled at laid-off journalists by Twitter trolls, cuts particularly deep because of how neatly it capture the sheer desolation that engulfs journalism’s professionally dispossessed. I’m sorry to be a professional chauvinist, but there is something unique about what we do: it requires such a specific skillset, and, when done right, it feels so meaningful and serves an indispensable societal role.

But not everyone recognises that; we’re easy to hate. So there they are, those faceless online hordes, thrilling at the idea of us having to chase employment in another field — a field in which, in the very best-case scenario, we’ll somehow succeed in beating out countless energetic 22-year-olds for a chance to work for an on-demand dogfood-delivery app destined for bankruptcy three months post-launch.

And yet, despite the profound structural emergency engulfing my field, I’d like to victim-blame just a little. My desire to do so stems from the fact that we just passed the first anniversary of the Covington Catholic High School debacle in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. It was genuinely one of the worst, most embarrassing recent moments in professional journalism, and there was never any real reckoning among those who screwed it up. Would such a reckoning save the industry? Of course not. But if we don’t grapple with what the Covington debacle revealed about where journalism is right now, we won’t have much worth saving, anyway.

In January of last year, you might recall, someone posted a short video of what appeared to be a group of jeering, cheering white kids — some in pro-Donald-Trump MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) hats — surrounding an older Native American man banging a drum in front of the Lincoln Memorial. These, it was quickly revealed, were students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, in town for the anti-abortion March for Life. The Native American man, it turned out, was a longtime activist named Nathan Phillips.

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In an interview with the Detroit Free Press published on 20 January, Phillips explained that he had ended up surrounded after trying to aid a group of black activists who were engaged in some sort of confrontation with the Covington kids. While acknowledging that those activists hadn’t been entirely blameless, Phillips presented himself as a de-escalator trying to prevent the white kids from getting out of hand.

“They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals,” Phillips said of the teens. “There was that moment when I realised I’ve put myself between beast and prey. These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that.”

This was the narrative that took hold: white predators and black and Native prey. Immediately, online outrage exploded, with internet harassment, death threats and every other form of digital outrage swamping everyone in the Covington orbit. The boys’ behavior was also — quickly — condemned by the Covington Catholic diocese.

But a video covering a longer span of the Covington kids’ experiences in DC, posted the same day as the Detroit Free Press article and almost two hours long, revealed a much different and more complicated story. The difference between what happened during the key moments, and what many journalists said happened, was capably summed up by Cathy Young and others, but is worth reviewing in detail. 

The longer video showed the kids wandering the Washington Mall, being yelled at and ocassionally yelling back at a racist and homophobic religious sect, the Black Hebrew Israelites, known by the denizens of some major American cities for its generally crazy and aggressive street-preaching (and later implicated in a horrific attack on a Kosher market in Jersey City)— these were the black activists in question and the filmer was one of their members.

At 1:12:35 in the video, after protracted jawing between the two groups, the Covington kids are clearly seen in a closed circle and are doing some sort of chant or cheer. Phillips doesn’t, as he claimed, place himself between the Covington kids and the Black Hebrew Israelites mid-confrontation — he works his way right to the edge of into the closed Covington circle, until he is noticed on account of his drumming.

This is completely incompatible with Phillips’ version of what happened, but to acknowledge this would  have toppled a viral narrative that was carried far and wide on the wings of morally satisfying good-guys-versus-bad-guys outrage.

So while some conservative and centrist and even liberal journalists did revise their accounts, apologise on Twitter and so on, and while the Kentucky diocese publicly apologised for its initial condemnation, the more common response was to simply either pretend this video didn’t show what it clearly showed, retreat to a different claim — Phillips caused himself to be surrounded by a circle of Covington kids, but was horribly mistreated by them once he was — or both.

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But just as there’s no video evidence to suggest any sort of real harassment or threat, Phillips was surrounded by the kids. A handful of the Covington kids did do the Tomahawk chop: it’s an offensive gesture to Native Americans, but one unfortunately done by countless fans of not one but three major American teams, many times every year. And there’s dancing and chanting and cheering in time with the drumbeat — a perfectly normal human reaction to the presence of a drumbeat. (In fact, some non-Covington bystanders and activists appear to be clapping and dancing in time with the drum before there’s any interaction with Phillips and the Covington kids.)

The most serious allegations confirmed by an in-depth investigation by a private detective agency hired by the Covington diocese involved the Tomahawk Chop and the kids chanting along with Phillips — that’s it. And Certain feverish internet rumors, like that the kids had chanted “Build the wall,” were proven totally false.

But both before and after the longer video was released, many journalists zeroed in on an infamous, brief moment during which Phillips and one of the Covington students, Nick Sandmann, are standing about a foot from one another, Phillips chanting and banging his drump, Sandmann grinning at him with a hard-to-decipher expression.

 
“The grin” quickly became notorious, and this was where the media really got out of control, tipping over into what can only be characterised as truly disgraceful behavior. “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?” asked Reza Aslan, an otherwise smart writer and commentator. Others agreed that this grin told us everything we needed to know about the story, while some of the tweets from journalists, like these from Kurt Eichenwald, come across as deeply deranged.

Much of the published coverage wasn’t much better. “The MAGA Teenager Who Harassed a Native American Veteran Is Still Unnamed,” went the headline of a Slate article, “but We’ve Seen His Face Before.” In that one, Ruth Graham — another person who is a deeply thoughtful writer in other contexts — called it the face “of a clutch of white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s”, of men making Nazi salutes and of “Brett Kavanaugh — then a student at an all-boys Catholic prep school — “drunkenly laughing” as he allegedly held down Christine Blasey Ford. Anyone who knew the popular white boys in high school recognized it: the confident gaze, the eyes twinkling with menace, the smirk.”

This is from a brief clip in which a Native American activist bangs a drum and chants, and a kid stands there, doing nothing but grinning strangely.

Now, Graham’s piece, and some of the other more embarrassing observations made by professional journalists and writers, did come before the full video dropped. So the single most important article one needs to read to understand the ridiculous, embarrassing extent to which journalists doubled down after the release of that video came a couple days later — written by Laura Wagner, then of Deadspin.

“Don’t Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes,” was the headline of her 21 January piece, which racked up more than a million views as my fellow left-of-center journalists eagerly passed it around to prove to one another, and themselves, that they’d done nothing wrong.

Posted a day after that video went online, Wagner criticised those who had backtracked from their earlier condemnation of the Covington kids, deriding them for “doing the work of the gibbering masturbators who had risen up in defense of the MAGA teens”. Bizarrely, it continued to take Phillips’ account as accurate, simply ignoring the evidence to the contrary: the new video, Wagner claimed, showed “that Phillips and other demonstrators present for the Indigenous Peoples’ March were interposing themselves between between teens draped in racist, misogynist paraphernalia and members of the Black Israelite cult,” strongly implying there was an ongoing confrontation at that precise moment.

Wagner’s article was an outrageous misinterpretation, and a particularly strange one in its insistence that it was others failing to respect the truth, but she was no outlier. Hence the million-plus views. Hence the lack, in most left-of-center quarters, of any sort of real reckoning with what a journalistic disaster this was. Once the outrage has set in, there’s very little incentive to let it go, because it feels unsatisfying and ego-threatening to admit such strong, morally charged feelings were unwarranted, that one’s own tribe was in error.

More than anything else, it sums up the increasingly potent belief among journalists that we must always be on guard about public instances of wrongspeak, that it’s potentially career suicide to be seen as falling on the wrong side of a given day’s most white-hot controversy (and, of course, every such controversy always has two sides and two sides only: a right one and a wrong one).

I call this the difference between rightside norms and accuracy norms. This is an oversimplified model, of course, but within a given community, accuracy norms incentivise people to seek out and state out loud the truth — to be the insufferable nerd who watches the video frame by frame, and who relies on that and only that if that’s what needs to be done — while rightside norms encourage people to loudly broadcast that they are on the right side of the issue, even if that requires twisting the evidence: Video be damned, I am not siding with those MAGA sickos!

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Of course there are conservative rightside norms, too, and a great deal of climate-change denialism falls into that same bucket — a point Yale’s Dan Kahan has done some important work on. In fact, there’s a case to be made that Right-wing journalism has, in the not too recent past, suffered from a bigger rightside-norms problem than its left-of-center counterpart. This, at least, is the credible argument Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum has been making for a long time. “The hack gap is a liberal problem of long standing,” he wrote in 2012: “Conservatives outscore us considerably in the number of bloggers/pundits/columnists/talking heads who are willing to cheerfully say whatever it takes to advance the party line, no matter how ridiculous it is.”

I think the hack gap is shrinking, though. As social media has carved out a bigger and bigger part of the daily existence of progressive journalists, and as mainstream outlets have shuttered, shed their older, more traditionally journalistic staffers  — with the new blood flowing into the industry being generally younger, more privileged, more partisan, and less interested in or well-trained to do what is seen as “old-school” journalism — rightside norms have begun infecting mainstream journalism and spreading within it like a plague.

That’s my diagnosis, at least. But if you disagree, just go on Twitter, which is where just about every left-of-center journalist 40 and under spends a big chunk of each and every working day. Over and over and over, you will see people whose job is to report the truth responding with strong half-baked opinions, or retweeting their friends’ and colleagues’ strong half-baked opinions, in response to breaking-news events about which very little is known so far.

This is a problem for obvious reasons. Imagine you’ve just finished watching a film. You loved it. But when the lights come up your three friends all begin whinging about how much they hated it. When this happens, unless you have superpowers, you will inevitably tamp down on your own professed enthusiasm for the film. It’s very hard to publicly go against the crowd, even in a low-stakes situation like that one.

Social media makes it much harder, because you are never more than a few seconds away from knowing what the “right” stance is on a given issue. In the case of Covington, which did not feel low-stakes, we progressive journalists were presented with such a starkly moralised template — white kids in red MAGA hats versus Native protester — that rightside norms quickly piloted many of us into an iceberg.

These dynamics have a real chilling effect on journalism. Freddie deBoer wrote eloquently of them in an essay about “the backchannel,” explaining how social-justice-oriented communities will inevitably rot from the inside when public disagreement on certain sacred subjects is verboten.

“When within-group criticism is only voiced privately,” he wrote, “there’s no opportunity for the group to evolve, to shore up its weakness, to evaluate its own problems, to correct its own course. And political movements have to evolve or die. It’s a classic cause of political self-destruction, when a group’s inner dynamics become so ossified and conformist that no one is willing to point out the group’s problems. That’s the condition in far too many left spaces today: a near-total inability to point out the cracks in the foundation for fear of being shamed yourself.”

I want to be crystal clear about what I am not arguing here, lest I be misinterpreted. I am not arguing for a return to some sort of view-from-nowhere style of journalism. I have no problem identifying as both a journalist but also as a progressive and someone who dislikes Trump rather fiercely. There is nothing wrong with having your journalism be driven by a sense of general ideological mission; some of the best journalists covering the working poor care deeply about the working poor, believe they are treated unfairly, and want to see their station improved. They’re still capable of, and produce, honest journalism.

What I am saying is that if you call yourself a journalist, there needs to be some distance, somewhere, between your tribal allegiances and the way you do your job.

To be clear, a return to a slightly more “traditional” understanding of journalism’s mission won’t save us. We’re probably doomed either way, but our doom is only going to come sooner, and be far uglier, if we can’t demonstrate our ability to add value, if we advertise, loudly and sanctimoniously, that we have nothing to offer an increasingly hyperkinetic and confusing informational ecosystem other than just another set of screaming outraged Twitter avatars.

This war truly divides American politics today: the struggle is between those who revere America’s past and those who question or disdain it. It is a war that, like binary conflicts of the past, promises to get much worse before resolution can be found.

America’s Founding Fathers recognised how dangerous such divisive binary wars over values could be to the political order. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison explained how the new Constitution was intended to minimise the dangers. Their arguments remain important today, both in understanding why America has so rarely become engulfed in these types of conflicts, and why it is now teetering on the brink of one.

They identified two types of conflicts that could destroy a state. The first flowed from the economic demands democracy would create. Looking to the ancient Greek and Roman republics, they sought to remove the possibility that a popular majority would try to take the wealth of a rich minority. To this end, the Constitution’s primary author, Madison, insisted on three innovations that remain mainstays of America’s governing structure: representation, bicameralism, and the separation of powers.

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The existence of the three reduces the possibility that one single group – what Madison called a faction – could seize control of all the levers of government at once. Representation ensured that a mob could not be whipped into a frenzy to violent action: their will could be exercised only indirectly. Bicameralism meant that a faction had to obtain control of two different electoral bodies, each with its own mode of election, and elected according to different schedules, to obtain legislative power. The separation of powers added a third hurdle: that such a faction would need to win control of an independently elected executive to wield the full power of government. Madison thought that these measures would break the zeal and intensity of a single faction’s desire to dominate, and as such preserve civic peace.

The second type of binary conflict stems from debates over ways of life. If one faction believed that their way was the right way, it could use control of the government to force its views on dissenters. This is what happened in Europe during the religious wars of the 16^thand 17^th Centuries, when Protestants and Catholics warred incessantly over whose was the one true religion.

Madison and the Founders sought to prevent such a destructive conflict from ever coming to America by removing religion from national politics altogether. The Constitution contains a clause that forbids the institution of a religious test for holding public office; in the United States, simply being a Catholic or a Jew would not bar one from public life.

The Constitution’s First Amendment also prevents Congress from “making any law respecting the establishment of a religion, or the free exercise thereof”, further removing religious disputes from national public life. Nothing in the original Constitution prevented states from establishing a religion; indeed, Massachusetts would not disestablish its state church until 1833, and New Hampshire did not remove its own religious test for office until 1876. The Constitutional impediments, however, did prevent religious quarrels from becoming national political questions.

Today’s conflict is neither religious nor economic. In this respect, the Founders’ protections have held. But the growth in national judicial power has made Madison’s original barriers to faction much less salient. And today, binary conflicts over values need not necessarily concern religious doctrines.

Americans today are, instead, deeply divided over culture; they are at odds over which is the best way of life to lead. On the one side are people who find America’s traditional, European, and Christian culture defective; on the other, there are those who believe that heritage to be valuable and essential. The first group finds its political expression in support for same-sex marriage, feminism, and measures empowering immigrants and non-whites. The second is the realm of the evangelical Christian and its allies in other orthodox and traditional faiths – as well as those worried about the declining importance of Americans of European heritage.

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A poll from late 2017 shows how neatly these views separate into the two political camps. Conducted by YouGov on behalf of the cross-partisan Voter Study Group, it asked whether respondents thought America “has one primary culture with traditions and values that most everyone believes in”, or “has many different cultures with different traditions and values that people believe in”. Seventy-seven percent of Clinton voters said America has many different cultures, while 54% of Trump voters said it had one primary culture. The share of respondents who thought America has one primary culture increased with self-described conservatism, and among groups most favourable to Trump or the religious Right.

These differences have spawned dramatic increases in partisan hatred. A new book, Prius or Pickup, citing survey data, shows that nearly half of Republicans and Democrats hate the other party, more than twice the level of hatred just two decades ago. Another survey taken in 2016 found that between 41 and 45 % of partisans thought the other party’s policies were a threat to the nation. By mid-2017 more than half of Democrats and Republicans thought the other party represented a national threat. In light of these data, perhaps recent editorials by liberal columnists saying the Kavanaugh confirmation was “illegitimate” or represented “war” should be taken as serious beliefs rather than hyperbole.

These cultural divides are politically crucial nowadays because America’s Constitution has, through decades of Supreme Court rulings, made them the subject of national political debate. The traditional understanding that the federal Constitution, and especially the First Amendment, did not apply to the states was overruled in a series of cases between 1925 and 1947. Since then, virtually every major issue concerning traditional Christian views of morality has been decided via a Supreme Court decision, not by legislation. As a result, cultural questions have been nationalised in a way the Founders sought to prevent, and control of the Court is thus vital to each side’s interests.

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This is why Kavanaugh’s nomination has stirred such passions. His confirmation meant that his would be the fifth and deciding vote that could overrule a host of Court precedents supported by Democrats and Clinton voters. For them, therefore, stopping him was a must, something that could not be compromised. The survival of their way of life depended on their winning this battle.

Similarly, traditionalists saw his vote as a bulwark against further potential Court rulings that might be adverse to their interests, as well as a potential vote to overturn such rulings as Roe v Wade (which established a constitutional right for a woman to have an abortion) or Obergefell v Hodges (which established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right across the United States). Losing for them was not an option.

The religious wars were similarly fought over the right way to live, each side deeming its own interpretation of Christianity as the one true one. Only the stalemate produced by over a century of warfare, culminating in the Treaty of Westphalia, ended the bloodshed.

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The Westphalian solution could be an answer to America’s woes, but adopting it would require turning back American jurisprudence to its earlier conceptions. The Treaty famously established the idea of religious federalism – as contained in the doctrine cuius regio, eius religio (the ruler of a realm determines its religion) – as the solution to the wars. This is identical in nature to the original American formulation that matters of culture should be for the individual states, and not the national government, to decide.

If applied today, it would mean that Baptist Alabama could have one set of laws concerning abortion and homosexuality, while progressive California could have another. Each side could believe zealously in its own views but, by removing the conflict from the national sphere, the nation itself could be preserved.

There would be difficulties, as the experience of post-Westphalian Europe demonstrates. Religious minorities within states were still subject to persecution. Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 ended the freedom of Protestants to worship, leading to mass emigration. Even Great Britain suppressed the rights of religious dissidents until a series of acts of “emancipation” restored full civil rights to Catholics (1829) and Jews (1858).

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In contemporary United States, however, many Americans would be concerned about what would happen in traditionalist states to non-whites, gays and lesbians, and women who sought abortions in other states. The federalist solution sits very uneasily with the ideal of universal human rights.

America did try this approach before, and it ended in our Civil War. And the division was over human slavery. The Founders had deferred the conflict when they drafted the Constitution by adopting a Westphalian model and leaving slavery to the states to determine. But by the mid-19^thCentury that solution no longer satisfied either side.

Those who opposed slavery in the free states of the North sought to either abolish it or curtail its spread by barring slaves from federal territories. Those who supported slavery in the slave-holding South sought to defend it as a positive good and insisted on the right to settle federal territories with slaves in tow. No attempt to mediate this dispute, although many were attempted, could satisfy both sides. And so, as President Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, “the war came”.

No one expects this conflict to end in war, but that is because the ability of one section of the country to resist another is no longer militarily possible. The potential for physical conflict cannot be ignored, however, as Left-wing activists follow conservative legislators to dinner to harass them, and Right-wing activists regularly denounce their foes as mendacious and deceitful.

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Hundreds of protestors have been arrested already within Senate office buildings as anti-Kavanaugh forces swarm offices of the last undecided members. In a country with nearly 400 million firearms in private hands, it would be easy to imagine random acts of violence breaking out anywhere in the country no matter what the Kavanaugh result had been. What happens now only God knows.

The third author of the Federalist Papers, John Jay, noted that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs”. That original unity no longer pertains, and that is the root the cause of the conflict.

It is difficult now to see how it ends. Similar conflicts in history have been defused through partition (India and Pakistan, for example), a grant of special rights to the minority, as in the Edict of Nantes or the Good Friday Agreement, or through the replacement of one set of primary values (Christianity) with another (liberalism). Each of these examples, though, contain the potential seeds of its own failure.

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America faced questions like these during the period of our massive immigration, which was diluting the political power of our original British, Protestant settlers with millions of Catholics and Jews from Ireland and Southern and Eastern Europe. After much trial and error, forged in part through the common experiences of the Great Depression and the Second World War, American identity morphed from that of a British-descended, Protestant country to one of the ‘melting pot’ where people from any background could come, so long as they adopted American values of decency, hard work, and devotion to political liberty.

It is possible that this identity can be updated to both include the new, secular or non-Christian American while maintaining the liberties and values of the older stock. But given the depth of the division and ferocity of the passions on display, it’s hard to see any sort of resolution coming soon.

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